A distributed or clustered data storage system typically comprises a network of servers in communication with multiple storage media nodes. An application program (e.g., a database application) running on one or more of the servers will require data associated with the application to be stored locally on the server, remotely on one or more of the storage media nodes, or stored both locally and remotely. A distributed or clustered data storage system comprising multiple storage nodes is typically architected with a data protection mechanism to provide protection from node failure by utilizing other nodes in the data storage system to, e.g., mirror stored data across multiple storage media nodes. In such protected data storage systems, it can be a challenge to improve storage write latency realized by an application without modifying the underlying data protection mechanism. Typically, the latency of write operations to the actual storage media nodes of the protected data storage system is much higher in comparison to the latency of the protection mechanism itself, which includes sending the writes over a network to potentially many other storage nodes. Therefore, in this circumstance, the latency of the protection mechanism would not be a bottleneck in the storage process.
Due to continuing innovations in storage media technologies, however, the operating speeds of storage devices are continually increasing, associated with lowering of latency. In this regard, it is difficult to realize the benefit of a lower storage latency provided by faster, state of the art storage media when the cluster storage protection mechanism that is implemented for a given data storage solution includes intrinsic overhead which, by itself, provides a latency floor that is much greater than the latency provided by much faster media. In this circumstance, when the storage media technology used to implement a protected data storage system has a very low latency as compared to the latency of the protection mechanism, then the protection mechanism becomes the bottleneck in the storage process. As such, the low latency afforded by the faster storage media cannot be realized, as every write must also experience the much higher latency of the protection mechanism.